The University of Kansas

Margaret Bourke-White

United States, 1904-1971
Through a Windshield, the 40-mile Baltimore-Washington Stretch Is One Long Clutter of Ugly Signs, 1938
silver print, 25.5x34.1 cm.
Peter T. Bohan Fund, 85.119

The Spencer Museum of Art has a large and comprehensive collection of approximately 15,000 works on paper, including prints, drawings, photographs, and artists’ books. The print collection is a representation of 500 years of print history. Included are woodcuts, etchings, engravings, aquatints, mezzotints, lithographs, screenprints, and many other less common printing techniques. The collection contains work by pioneers in the graphic arts, including Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, Käthe Kollwitz, and Pablo Picasso. Among the strengths of the print collection are Renaissance, 19th-century, European, 20th-century American (including special holdings of Prairie Print Makers and pop art), and Japanese prints.

The Spencer’s photography collection has over 4,000 objects that include daguerreotypes, tintypes, albumen-silver prints, gelatin-silver prints, stereographs, and color prints. The collection represents the history of photography from the 1840s to the present and contains works by leading and less-known European and American photographers. The collection is especially strong in documentary and journalistic photographs made in America from the 1930s through the 1970s. These include documentary-style pictures from the Depression by Walker Evans and other photographers working for the federal government’s Farm Security Administration and all the photographs commissioned from the 1930s to the 1960s by Esquire, a leading glossy magazine. Among other strengths of the collection are art photography of the 1960s and 1970s by regional and national photographers and 19th-century views of Kansas by Alexander Gardner.